De Motu Cordis

Some revolutions in thought arrive at the lectern and die there, applauded and unrepeated. Others slip out of a country in a diplomatic post-bag, addressed to a printer in another language, and come back two years later on the carts of a book-fair, harder to refute for having travelled. A doctrine that has held for fourteen hundred years is rarely unseated in the room where it was taught. It is unseated by a quiet man who has counted, and who has decided where the counting shall be printed.

THE PHYSICIAN AT WHITEHALL

William Harvey was fifty years old in the autumn of 1628, born at Folkestone on the first of April 1578, schooled at the King's School in Canterbury, then at Gonville and Caius, then at Padua under Hieronymus Fabricius, whose 1603 demonstration of the valves in the veins he had watched as a young man and never forgotten. He had taken his MD at Padua in 1602, returned to London, married Elizabeth Browne, attached himself to St Bartholomew's, and risen through the College of Physicians by the steady, unflashy ascent of a man who answered every summons. He was in his eighth year as Physician Extraordinary to Charles I. He had delivered the substance of the circulation thesis at the Lumleian lectures of April 1616, in the College's Latin, before an audience of colleagues who had received it with the internal politeness and private hostility he had expected. For twelve years since, he had let the doctrine sit in his lecture-notes while he refined the arithmetic and the dog-vivisection. The manuscript was now finished. The question was where to set the type.

THE WEST WINDOW

It is past nine in the evening, an unrecorded day in October, lamp-light through the west window of the physician's lodging at Whitehall. On the desk are sixty-eight folio sheets in his own hand, dedicated in the late summer to the most illustrious and indomitable Prince, Charles, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, and to Dr Argent, President of the College. The fire is low. Outside, the river-smell carries up from the Thames; somewhere a watchman calls the hour. He has counted the ounce of blood the left ventricle expels at each contraction, multiplied by the pulse, multiplied by the hour, and produced a quantity so large that the liver cannot manufacture it and the flesh cannot consume it. The conclusion is forced. The blood returns. It is a closed circle, driven by a pump. Galen is wrong. The question on the desk this evening is not whether the thing is true. The question is which press shall set it.

A SECOND OF TIME IN THE STUDY

He weighs the Stationers' Company in London against the press of William Fitzer in Frankfurt am Main. The Stationers will hold the manuscript for the ecclesiastical licence six months at the least; in the present temper of the bishops, with Laud rising and innovation in natural philosophy treated with suspicion at every committee, the licence may not come at all. To print in London is to print under the gaze of men who do not read Latin well and who fear what they cannot read. To print in Frankfurt is to send the book to the fair that has, since the 1610s, carried the serious continental philosophy in and out of every university library between Padua and Leiden. He thinks of Galileo, of the Italian presses already closing one by one around him; the Dialogo will not come from Rome. He thinks of the readership, three thousand Latinate men in England, perhaps ten times that across the continent, all of them reachable through one set of folio sheets bound in Frankfurt and shipped at the spring fair. He thinks of the College, which has kept its peace with him in the corridor and will not keep it once the book is in print, and decides that the College's quarrel is not the licensing committee's quarrel and need not be conducted through it. He thinks of the King, who is named on the first page and who will not be asked. The print-run, he calculates, will be five hundred. The first edition will sell through in two years. The covering letter, in Latin, is written that evening to Fitzer.

THE FRANKFURT IMPRINT

The manuscript went out by the diplomatic post in the first week of November 1628. Fitzer set it through the winter. It was offered at the spring book-fair of 1629 as Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, a Latin octavo of seventy-two pages, twenty thousand words, dedicated to Charles and to Argent, priced for the Latin trade. Copies travelled south to Padua and Bologna, north to Leiden and Hamburg, west across the Channel into the hands of the English physicians who had sat through the Lumleian lectures and now had to read in print what they had been able to dismiss in the lecture-room. The Galenic edifice of fourteen centuries, the venous tree rooted in the liver and the arterial tree rooted in the heart and the blood consumed at the tissues like fuel, was, in seventy-two octavo pages, asked to defend itself against a quantitative argument it could not answer.

THE COLLEGE

In the College of Physicians at Amen Corner, the response was the response Harvey had predicted at the west window. James Primrose answered him in print in 1630 with the loyalty of a Galenist who could see that loyalty was now the case to be made. Jean Riolan in Paris answered him in 1648, distinguished and dismissive. The senior colleagues kept their peace in the corridor and broke it on the page. Harvey continued in his duties: physician to the King through the civil wars, present at Edgehill in October 1642 reading a book under a hedge with the royal children in his charge while the cannon fired half a mile off, with the King at Oxford, with the King at the surrender. He resigned from St Bartholomew's, withdrew from public practice, kept up his correspondence with the continent, and watched, year by year, the younger men come over to him. He told John Aubrey, in the late 1640s at Aubrey's record, that no man under thirty years of age, that he knew of, did not accept his doctrine, and no man above forty, that he knew of, did. The College debated him for a generation. The generation passed.

THE ROEHAMPTON ROOM

William Harvey died at his brother Eliab's house in Roehampton on the third of June 1657, seventy-nine years old, of a stroke that took his speech first and his life within the day. He had outlived his wife, his King, and most of his Galenist opponents. The Royal Society would be founded three years later on the physiological frame he had set. His later book on the chicken embryo, De Generatione Animalium, published in 1651 from a London press because by then a London press would set it, is the foundation of modern embryology. He is buried in the lead-wrapped fashion of his time, in the chapel he built at Hempstead in Essex for his nephew, the parish of the Harvey family. The Royal College of Physicians in London holds his own copy of the 1628 Frankfurt first edition, with seven manuscript corrections in his own hand for the second Frankfurt edition of 1635, the marginalia of a man still counting.

THE PUMP

Some discoveries are made in the lecture-room and lost in the lecture-room because the room defends what it has taught. The decisive act is not the discovery; the discovery had been on the desk for twelve years. The decisive act is the choice of imprint, the willingness to send the seventy-two pages across the sea to a press that does not know the author and does not care about the College, and to let the spring fair do the work the lecture-room would not do. Harvey's heart, by the autopsy of 1657, was found enlarged and worn; the pump had worked, by his own arithmetic, something near a thousand million times. In the Library at Lambeth a small octavo bound in vellum, foxed at the edges, sits open on a stand to the diagram of the ligated arm, the line of the valves in the vein, and the simple Latin caption that has not needed to be revised in four hundred years.